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Topic: Designing the 1905 Regal (Read 2221 times)

Every year I try to attend Ken Eder’s show, held every 1st weekend of November in Carthage, North Carolina. The show is called “one hundred years of progress”. Ken has a HUGE collection of antique tractors, traction engines, engines, and other assorted things mechanical. The show encompasses building after building of stuff; if you are in the area in November I’d highly recommend that you attend. There are many youtube videos of the show if you are curious; search “Ken Eder show” or “Ederville” or “100 years of progress"

It’s getting toward winter with the accompanying winter weather, so I suspect I’ll be spending some time away from the unheated shop and looking for something to occupy my time indoors.

While at Ken’s show I took a fancy to a little open frame bottle shaped vertical gearless hit-and-miss engine labeled “Regal”, built in 1905. Being armed with the camera on my phone and a measuring tape the folks there were kind enough to allow me to take many pictures and measurements. My thoughts were that this winter I might want to make drawings of the engine with the intent of building it some time. So now I finally get around to the title of this thread.

A video of this engine appears on youtube so you can get an idea of the subject matter.

The engine is a gearless, igniter fired hit-and-miss engine. It is water cooled, but uses simple convection to circulate the water. The governor is built as a suspended weight, the motion of which above a certain speed angles a lock-out lever over to hold the exhaust valve open. It also has an interesting mechanism to only trip the igniter when required. If you study the youtube video closely you can probably figure all this out.

Here’s another opportunity for me to use the 3-D CAD software I purchased a little over a year ago; software of which I and am slowly becoming proficient (but no expert I assure you). The software is “Cubify Design”, just in case you’re wondering. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of the professional packages, but doesn’t cost an arm and a leg either. My intention would be to machine all these components; I’m not going to look into patterns and castings. Here’s what I have so far, after around a day of work.

I’ll show you the individual components first and then an assembly. I suspect each of these may/will change some as the design progresses. That’s one of the pleasures of designing on the computer; you can change a part without a re-draw and usually, all the other components will adjust accordingly.

This is the engine base, looking from the top. The recess will give clearance for the connecting rod and crankshaft throw. This part has around a one degree taper. If I had a taper attachment on the lathe, fabricating this would be a snap; without it I’ll have to get inventive.

This view is the same part, looking from the bottom. The recess here is for a fuel tank. There is a final disk that attaches to this “base” that the engine rests upon. This disk will be around ¼ in. thick on the model. I could have designed this part with that disk attached, but that would have required a much larger diameter of aluminum which would raise the cost of materials. It’s easier in cost and fabrication on the mo0del to just make it separate and then attach it with a few screws, all that remaining to be designed.

Next is the ring that sits on top of the base. On the full size this is a separate piece also. The component also has journal blocks for the lower crankshaft split bearings. This is the top view.

And the bottom side

Following are the journal caps top and bottom.

Next up is probably the most difficult piece of this prospective build, the cylinder and forks. The legs have a one degree taper, to continue the taper defined by the base. The cylinder has a recess where, once a cast iron liner is pressed in place, should form a cavity for the water. This will be an interesting piece to fabricate, but I have a few ideas.

A view from the bottom in an attempt to show the water cavity.This part still needs a lot detail added, but it’s a start.

Here’s the assembly, so far…

If you're overly observant, you've already noticed one of the compromises I've incorporated in this design. The full size has four bosses cast into the base where the ring containing the journal bosses attaches. These would be the devil to machine so my design omits them and moves the mounting screws further into the ring where there is material in the base where which they can attach. With the model complete and sitting beside the original, a sharp observer would notice this.

Looks like an interesting subject with it's little star wheel to get the timing.

I wonder if making the base from steel would allow the bosses to be soldered or welded on, with aluminium unless you can weld it sticking the bosses on would be the only option and I would not want to trust adhesives for that, though pinning at the bottom below the threaded hole and some JBWeld may work. If you could get some thick wall tube then rather than mill the two rectangular pockets a horizontal divider could be added half way up to save milling it all out.

What is the bore going to be? as that would give an idea of the sizes involved.

Jason- This is a fair approximation of the flange. It would have a curved face to match the profile of the base and an outer tapering profile.

There would be four of them on 90 degree centers; the picture only shows one.

I “could” fabricate the flanges and just pin and glue them to the base for cosmetic appeal as you state, not expecting them to hold anything. Fabricating them could be problematic with the two curves. Each would be only about 5/8th inch in length. Probably mill the inside curve and file the outside till cosmetically appealing.

At one third size, the model would stand just under 11 inches tall with flywheels 7 in. diameter. The bore would be 1.333 in.

I can't see that you will be wanting to remove the lower bearing plate from the base very often so the fixings could be moved out of sight by placing them through the sides of the lower bearing blocks and you could also possibly put a CSK screw under the foot of the standard. Then the side bosses can just be added as dummies and stuck with JB Weld

Comments and suggestions are always welcome; in fact Jason had such a great suggestion that I’ve already incorporated it in the design. (Jason- I’ll be sure you get a portion of the royalties from the massive interest that this design generates. )

Thanks for stopping in Roger, and the others stopping by without comment.

I stared in on the design of the exhaust/governor/ignitor lockout mechanism today. Lots of calculations and adjusting but things are coming together. As usual, I’m discovering the photos I “should” have taken to make things clearer, but I haven’t come across something I can’t figure out so far with the information I collected.

The mechanism is fairly interesting in that a pushrod rides in a guide, and has a roller that fits into an eccentric slot in a disk on the crankshaft. In this CAD rendering, the cam eccentric is blue and the pushrod is pink. As the crankshaft rotates, this roller follows the eccentric slot in the cam and drives the pushrod up and down.

Up on the side of the forks, this motion is captured by a shaft that slides inside a cylinder attached to the engine frame. I haven’t drawn this shaft yet, but the fixture that drives it is shown below.

The shaft (indirectly) operates the exhaust valve and the governor. Hopefully this will become clear as the design progresses.

I can see from the replies/views that there is interest in what I’m doing. Thanks for all of you who take the time to visit.

The snow and cold weather has provided ample opportunity to further the design of this model. Not that much snow or cold, but enough to keep me in doors and working at the computer. I’m starting to get comfortable using this CAD design tool; I’m spending less and less effort in trying to get the software to depict what I want to accomplish and this, in turn, allows me to think more clearly on the primary task of designing this engine.

With the basic frame shape established I’ve moved on to the design of the valve and governor mechanisms. The video below is one of the ones I took while I was in Carthage, inspecting the full size. In this video I’m turning the engine over by hand. The video is a close up of the star wheel, ratchet and pawl that allow this engine to run 4-cycle without gears. The push rod to the left is driven by an eccentric on the crankshaft I mention up post. The ratchet and pawl turns the star wheel. This wheel actuates the exhaust valve at every other revolution of the crankshaft.

Below I give you the CAD renderings I’ve drawn. It’s missing a few parts, screws, and stops; all of which I’ll add later once the design is finalized.

In this drawing, the crankshaft has revolved to where the eccentric has move the push rod to the top of its travel. The star wheel and ratchet have been carried above the pawl and with the star wheel in this position, the exhaust valve would have been opened.

In the next CAD rendering, the crankshaft has been rotated near 180 degrees and the push rod, driven by the eccentric on the crankshaft, has moved to the bottom of its travel. Unfortunately, my CAD system won’t allow me to revolve the star wheel part (either a shortcoming of the software or my ignorance of some functionality) so we’ll have to imagine that the pawl would have engaged the ratchet to revolve the star wheel 60 degrees and position the cut-out in the star wheel in the top position .

Below I give you a in close view of the ratchet, pawl, star wheel design. The star wheel will be around 5/8th inch in diameter, the ratchet a little under 1/2 inch in diameter.

Furthering the design, I've temporarily abandoned the valve mechanism and moved on to designing the head. The head is interesting in that the intake valve, exhaust valve, and igniter share a common chamber situated on the side of the cylinder head.

The intake valve seat and guide fits the top to this chamber, the exhaust valve seat and guide fit to the bottom, and the igniter fits into the front. It took a bit of thinking to decide how I wanted to accomplish this from a milling standpoint, and I doubt my solution matches the full size casting, but it should work; both from an external aesthetic standpoint and from a functional one also.

In the first photo you see my rendering of the inside of the head. All internal passageways are shown. The second photo is a front on view, the flat area is where the yet to be to be designed igniter attaches.

Finally, I provide a view of the head as it attaches to the engine frame. There is “method to my madness” in designing the head now. I need to set the dimensions properly so that the valve chambers align directly over the star wheel. This will position the end of the exhaust valve stem over the star wheel where star wheel motion can activate the exhaust valve.

It's coming together well, as you say one of the things about designing your own engine is that you have to think how it will be made and design to suit what tooling you have available.

I'll enquire with one of the Alibre team to see about meshing gears and let you know. I can now get my version of Alibre to produce spur gears so may as well see if they work when playing designing on the screen.

Jason. Hmmmmmm. Drawing gears. I've done it, but I've done it by drawing a sketch of an individual gear tooth, them using the "circular pattern" function to replicate that sketch around a center. Then extruding the sketch to a depth to define a "sort of" gear. What results is something that looks like a gear, but "Cubify Design" certainly doesn't recognize it as such.

I've scowered the package but don't see any reference to it's ability to draw gears. Sure would be nice.

I'll add that It' also confusing that the crankshaft turns in the drawing and moves the piston, connecting rod, etc with it, the push rod also moves up and down (though I can't seem to figure a constraint that allows the software to realize the roller on the pushrod should follow the eccentric grove cut-out in the cam wheel.

The star wheel and ratchet seem frozen in place. I believe I've set the constraints properly so that it should be able to rotate, don't know why it won't ?

Remember though, I'm not using the Alibre professional version; I'm using the watered down version.

Nice wok on the CAD project, this engine is very similar to the gear less Olds. The Olds uses an eccentric to drive the star wheel and ratchet. On the frozen star wheel, you should be able to right click on the wheel in the design tree and tell it to (make flexible) at least that is what you can do in Alibre.

The Man from Alibre says No though there are a few dodges that may get equal gears to mesh and turn

The latest update of Professional came with the script to draw gears. It is not something in the new Atom3D which is the pared down version that is like you have. In the past when I have wanted a gear I draw it out in Fusion 360 (free) and then imported it into Alibre.

Did you do a sub assembly of the star wheel parts, I find that sometimes when a sub assembly is added to the main assembly you can loose the ability to move some of the parts.

Dave and Jason. Thanks for your thoughts. Looks like my product is an older, watered down version of thew current Alibre. It is not the current Atom3D. It (apparently) looks a lot like the current Alibre- being a predecessor. If I right click a part, there is no mention of "flexible", if i "right click"the part in the "design explorer" I can see the "make flexible" but it is greyed out.

I'm not using sub-assemblies as I found out that I loose all movement of the parts when I do, though maybe the "make flexible" might work were I using sub-assemblies?

As far as I know the Make Flexible command is only for sub assemblies; maybe the type and number of assembly mates you used on the star wheel has it locked in place. If you brought it in as a single part it should rotate. Can you look at the assembly mates for the star wheel and let us know what you have there?

I think the new Alibre folks have an upgrade to Atom from the Geomagic Cubify program, but I'm not sure what the cost is.

No, I haven't anchored the part. I have the ratchet and shaft as one part and the star wheel as another. The constraints are as follows: 1- Aligned the shaft of the ratchet to the star wheel to mount the star wheel on the ratchet shaft2- aligned a star wheel face to a face on the ratchet shaft to prevent the star wheel from sliding up and down on the shaft3- set an angle between one face of the ratchet "tooth" to one face of star wheel "prongs" so that they turn together.

I've done this as individual parts to the one main assembly and also as a sub assembly. Either way the star wheel and ratchet refuse to revolve.

In my "poking around" today I noticed that the Atom3D folks that support the full blown Alibre and a personal version that retails for around $200. I ought to look into that because when I attempted to see if updates were available for Cubify I got a message that the "server was not available"; a clear sign that they've dropped support.

I wonder if the angle mate is the problem? Can you suppress or delete the angle mate and see if it changes anything?Not sure about Cubify, but in Alibre you can show the reference planes of any part in your assembly by right clicking on the part and selecting "Show Reference Geometry" (you also need to have the Toggle Planes turned on in the view menu. Then you can mate a plane from one part to another, I use this quite often. This may be a better choice than the angle mate.

If you bring in only the star wheel and make it concentric to the bore that it runs on will it spin then? it should.

I have discovered that if I set an angle from one of the ratchet tooth planes and any flat surface on the same axis as that plane on the engine frame, I can change the angle and the ratchet and star wheel will rotate together as instructed. This will suffice for me, since I really only wanted to do it to look at tolerances (the machined pawl will probably look different anyway). Actually, I didn't need it to rotate, it was more of a "This ^&$#@( thing ought to rotate, why won't it."

I would assemble the ratchet and star wheel as a sub assembly then when you bring them into the main assembly just use constraints 1 & 2

If think you are past the special deals that were being done to bring people with old versions upto date so you will be looking a a new one off payment for Atom3D, it does all that your Cubify does plus one or two other bits that have now been enabled that are standard on the more expensive versions.

With the Frisco Standard casting set appearing, I’m torn with where I want to spend my time; still I’d like to finish the design of this engine before I put it away for a future build while I work on the Frisco Standard.

The importance of getting this engine designed while the details are still relatively fresh in my mind took on increased importance as of last week. I was told that in a tragic accident Ken Eder was killed. I didn’t really know the man but my heart goes out to his family. On an associated note, access to his marvelous collections and specifically to this engine may no longer be available so best to complete the design now.

I believe I’ve completed the intake, exhaust, and governor assemblies. In this picture I give you a front view.

Here is a side view of the engine. You can see the intake manifold on top of the head with the atmospheric actuated intake valve.

This rendering is a close-up of the governor portion of the design. A picture of the actual engine follows.

The governor functions by the brass weight sliding up and down the shaft and levering the vertical arm over to where it catches the exhaust valve stem and holds the valve open. Simple momentum controls the motion of this weight. It’s going to be interesting to model this action, and I can see some repetitive trial and re-trial to get things working.

The design is moving toward completion. Yet to be designed are the flywheels, ignitor, and mixer.

Very nice project, I'm following it along eagerly.I did a gearless engine a few years back, lot of pleasure to design, but without the hit & miss regulation, a little too fiddly, I thought; but I would return on it looking at your design...congratulations and thanks to share

After several days of marathon CAD sessions, I’m about ready to wrap up this design. I have the mixer and exhaust to design/draw as yet but I thought it was time to post progress.

I re-worked the final assembly, using subassemblies which made the management of the project a lot easier so I’ll go through each of the components and then do a final main assembly. (it will be a miracle if anyone actually reads this from beginning to end but… here we go).

The frame assembly with the crankshaft and main bearings installed. This is pretty much a repeat of what I posted up thread.

Following is the connecting rod. The original isn’t a fancy piece so I couldn’t see embellishing the model any. I’m using split bearings; I don’t know if the full size original uses them or not.

This is the exhaust assembly. It bolts to the underside of the head as you’ll see later. The lever coming out the side is used to “lock out” the igniter when the exhaust valve is held open. The grey slug on the bottom with the wedge cut in is part of the governor exhaust valve lock-out mechanism.

Here I’m showing a slightly different view. I also have the exhaust valve lifted against the spring.

This is a view of the intake Assembly. It’s atmospheric controlled as you would expect. This assembly bolts to the head immediately above the exhaust assembly.

This is the pushrod assembly. It has a roller that is captured and runs in a slot in the cam. The rear pushrod controls the star wheel mechanism which in turn controls the exhaust valve motion. The front pushrod and clevis is used to actuate the igniter.

On to the ratchet and star wheel which are at the heart of this engine mechanism. The green bracket is mounted to the engine frame and the ratchet, star wheel, and vertical post slide up and down within the bracket. This motion causes the star wheel to rotate and the alternate high spots / low spots on the star wheel allow four cycle operation.

In this view the mechanism is at the bottom of its travel and the pawl has just finished rotating the star wheel.

In this view the mechanism is at the top of its travel. We’re assuming that momentum has lifted the green weight, pivoting the long “teeter” bar so that it will engage the grey slug on the bottom of the exhaust valve (shown in the exhaust renderings above), thus allowing the engine to coast through one or more firing cycles.

Next I show the igniter. This is the back side, internal to the combustion chamber. The contact points will be made from tungsten; a material I’ve had good success with in igniter points in previous models.

Here is the igniter, front side (missing the springs). The “anvil” is the half-moon piece which is connected to the movable contacts. The hammer is the straight bar. When in trip, the hammer is drawn down off the stop. A lite spring bringing the anvil along with it until the contacts close. With additional motion a stiffer spring is wound as the hammer drawn away from the anvil. When the igniter trips, the hammer is drawn against the anvil by the heavy spring and then the lighter spring and momentum carries the hammer (and anvil) up against the stop as the contacts abruptly open.

This is the igniter trip assembly. The trip can pivot on a mandrel installed through the hole on the upper left of the main part (mandrel not shown). A spring and stop screw (also not shown) allows the trip to pivot on the mandrel but return to the position as shown. This is useful when the trip mechanism resets after it has tripped the igniter.

The offset cam and lever is actuated by the exhaust lockout to pivot this igniter trip mechanism away from the hammer on the igniter so that it will not trip when the exhaust valve is locked out.

Finally I give you (for those still with me) the assembled renderings. This view is near complete; missing only the mixer, exhaust, and water coolant piping.

A little more detailed view of the mechanism. Here, the push rods have been moved to the full downward position. The pawl has just completed rotating the star wheel. In this rendering, the engine is about to take a power stroke, the exhaust is not in lockout.

Here the pushrods are at their highest position. The exhaust valve has been opened by the star wheel. I can’t seem to get my CAD software to cooperate, but the green lever on the igniter trip mechanism “should” have lifted, rotated the eccentric, and moving the igniter trip over to the left a slight amount so that it clears the hammer on the igniter so the igniter doesn’t trip.

I’m hoping to complete this design in a few more days. Then I’ll probably put it on the shelf with plans to build the model at some future time; maybe this summer.

I think I would vote for a little more detail on how you developed the model rather than less. Of course, I have been a bit reluctant to enter the world of electronic drafting, let alone 3-D, so it all encourages and helps me understand a little more of how to start. I will have to take the step eventually.

Looking great. I hope eventually to see it remodelled in metal. All in its turn of course.

Last post before I put this design away for a while. Here you see the mixer and muffler designed and installed. The mixer appears to be of the simple suction variety so that’s how I designed it.

I’ll be putting this design on the shelf for now; I have a newly arrived casting set I’m keen to get started on. I’m thinking of starting the build for this engine after that engine is complete. I think Jo stated that you always need to have several projects “In the wings” (If I may paraphrase).

Dave- you ask a good question. When I observed the engine in operation (and I think you can make it out on the video I give on the preliminary post) the weight was freely sliding up and down the column. I guess?? You could tighten the set screw and disable the governor??? Why would you want to do that??? Maybe during setup??? I just don’t know.

MJM- There could be a hundred pages involved in explaining the thought processes going into this model. I took many photos and measurements of the full size. These helped me in designing the individual parts and getting the scale “more or less” correct. 3-D design must be an art form. So much goes into drawing the individual parts. In a way, how you draw the individual parts makes a huge difference in how much re-work you need to do. You learn to draw a component, building constraints into the lines on the drawing, so that you can re-size a part and all the non-essential lines will adjust accordingly. This is a huge boon to productivity because it allows you to rapidly modify a part without redrawing it. That part will go into sub-assemblies, and the sub-assemblies to other sub-assemblies, till finally the main assembly. If you’ve done the drawings and constraints correctly, the change you made “shifts up the line” and you have no other adjustments to make.

For Final assembly, I found myself assembling the sub-assemblies, using the assembly tool to measure the clearances (or lack thereof) and making minor changes to a few key components to get everything to final assemble correctly. It’s really a great tool for design but hard to explain till you get in there and learn by doing.

Thanks for the explanation. It seems a lot of work to start the learning curve, and some extra to put in those constraints, but the payoff clearly comes when you need to modify a part, an inevitable step in design development.

I've been using my CAD tool "cubify design" on the cold winter days to create the drawings so that I'll have them all together and ready to start cutting metal when this project percolates to the top of the list.

Last week I launched Cubify and went to open a part and the software "tanked" with a fatal windows error. With Cubify being an unsupported product, this was going to be a problem (catastrophy?).

The 3D Systems folks, who used to market Cubify were of little assistance, saying that probably some recent windows maintenance was incompatible. (Really, do ya think )

Anyway, I ended up calling the Alibre folks, and they gave me a GREAT deal on getting me into Alibre Design Professional. This gets me support again and I found that Alibre Design Professional works with all my Cubify projects just fine

I mention this in part because if you are a Cubify Design user, your days are really numbered and you might be able to move up for a reasonable price like I did.

I'm still running my copy of cubify under Windows 10, Windows 7 and XP. The error only occurs on the Windows 10 machine if I try to add text to a 2D drawing. Thankfully I have a standalone license so was not impacted when they turned off the license server, something I learnt to ask for after they dinged me for a second full fee when I updated my previous computer

So I now have a dedicated stand alone (non updating ) machine to do my CAD on, Thank you Dave

Mine was failing when I tried to open a drawing. The latest Windows update got me so you might want to delay that update. Interestingly enough, Alibre Pro, right after install, was failing for the same problem; but the Alibre folks pointed me to a .mso file that windows published to "fix" it.

This is the URL to the "fix" if you need it, I suspect it would "fix" cubify also.